Free Cross My Heart and Hope to Die by Sheila Radley

eyes with a torn scrap of sheet that she was using as a hanky and, wonderfully revived, returned to the frying pan. ‘Well, thank the Lord for that! All right, let them keep their stinking turkeys over at Saintsbury. I’d sooner scrub floors for Mrs Vernon than do that job.’
    For Mum, that says the lot. She’s permanently fed up with her own housework and she hates the idea of doing it for anyone else. Her own mother, Gran Bowden, left school when she was twelve, before World War One, to work as a kitchen maid in a big house. She kept at it until she married and as soon as her children were at school she was at it again, doing other people’s housework as well as her own. She died when I was eight, and until a month before her death she went scurrying out every morning wearing a felt hat, with an apron under her coat, to spend the day scrubbing other people’s floors. It’s something Mum would never do, and she’s never forgiven Mrs Vernon for asking her.
    I was at home when it happened, one Saturday in March not long after Gran Bowden died. There had been no field work for weeks and Mum was getting fractious, so Mrs Vernon couldn’t have chosen a more likely time to pick her way down from the farm in a camel-hair coat and a silk headscarf, towed by a large dog, to enquire whether Mum would care to give her a little help in the house three mornings a week.
    â€˜No thank you,’ said Mum, putting on her poshest voice to compensate for her baggy old clothes and the enviable fact that even at eleven in the morning Mrs Vernon smelled as sophisticated as the toiletry counter at Boots.
    Mum had answered so promptly that Mrs Vernon assumed she’d misunderstood. ‘Well, of course, I should pay you, Mrs Thacker.’
    â€˜I’m not in need of money, thank you, Mrs Vernon.’
    There was an awkward pause. I knew that Gran Bowden would have asked the visitor in and apologized for the untidiness and dusted a chair for her, but Mum stood blocking the doorway. She replied nicely, firm without being rude, but her ears and neck were red and her behind shook with indignation.
    â€˜A little extra money is always useful, though, isn’t it?’ coaxed Mrs Vernon. ‘Say three and six an hour …?’
    Mum swallowed, tempted but not won over. ‘Not for double the money,’ she said grandly.
    Her opponent knew when she was beaten. ‘Then I’m sorry to have bothered you, Mrs Thacker.’
    â€˜Not at all, Mrs Vernon.’
    The farmer’s wife retreated up the lane, leaving Mum chuntering away to herself on the doorstep. I stopped listening, until she said something about being thankful that ours wasn’t a tied house.
    â€˜What’s a tied house?’
    â€˜One that’s part of the farm, goes with the job, like the Crackjaws’. If you’re tied, you can’t afford to offend your employer or you might lose your job and your house as well. Not that poor Gladys needs to worry, Mrs V.’s not likely to ask her to do any cleaning.’
    I was puzzled. ‘But why does next door belong to the farm, when our house belongs to Gran Thacker?’
    â€˜They all belong to Gran Thacker. Mr Vernon’s a tenant farmer. He rents the Crackjaws’house from her, same as he rents the farm. Gran Thacker owns the lot.’
    This bit of information was so fantastic that I stood and boggled at her. ‘Gran owns all three houses? The whole of Longmire End?’
    â€˜And more. Old man Thacker owned half the village at one time. He was a dealer as well as keeping the shop, he bought and sold anything he could lay his hands on, and farms were cheap enough before the war.’
    â€˜Then Gran Thacker must be rich?’
    â€˜Tidy,’ agreed Mum.
    This idea took some getting used to. Gran Thacker certainly didn’t look or behave rich. She was a dry little old thing, tough as the leather bootlaces that hung like sticks of